I love social media

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There, I said it.

I might be super dorky admitting this, but I actually really dig social media. For everyone hating on facebook, twitter, geo-location apps, cloud computing etc, there’s some good reasons to love social media. I understand why some people think it may be an invasion of privacy, an infringement on their civil liberties or just one big conspiracy theory for ‘the system’ to track the minutae of your existence (well I don’t really understand that one, but hey, if we’re caught on film more than once a day it’s only a matter of time before we all have tracking devices touted as accessories...)


Social media has been great in bringing people together who previous hadn’t made valuable connections. It’s been a tool to build communities around interest and commonalities and helped foster creativity.

Definitely social media needs to be used in the right way, otherwise you’re likely to break yourself.

So I’ve pulled together a list of reasons why I dig social media and why it’s reputation should be more positive than it currently is:

1. Social media (re)connects

2. Social media allows for better user-generated content creation

3. Social media encourages transparent communication (and this has been proven to be good for business, brands and issues)

4. Social media is flexible enough for the conversation to take direction on its own, and not be dictated by the tool’s limitations

5. Social media is a shell-like tool – it’s worth is in the content it can contain and the meta-data (echoes?) that come out of it

6. Social media is the fruition of ideas

I think George Siemens put it best when he said social media (or Web2.0 generally) was about communication and connection. He goes on to talk about Web3.0 and Web X, but that’s an entirely different post.

So sure, I'm on a bandwagon, but it that really something to be concerned about? Is there a real basis for the panicked concerns of all the social media haters? Discuss (or not, as you wish).